Realtime Beta for Social Search Monitoring

Bit.ly is one of the more popular URL shortening services, saving tweeters some of those precious 140 characters for those all-important hashtags, but it appears that the company are now looking to extend their service offering.

This month saw the announcement of their new private beta named Realtime (find it over at rt.ly). The  beta allows you to view the most popular links across a range of social media platforms and filter these according to your interests, keywords, preferred location and target domains.

Although this is looking more applicable for social marketing at present, the new tool could prove a useful resource for SEOs in the coming months. We know that search engines are adding more value to socially shared links and rt.ly is certainly going to come in handy for campaign research as well as monitoring brand presence and impact within social spaces.

iCrossing’s previous whitepaper focused on using Google+ to drive traffic and improve visibility, and in it we addressed the importance of creating compelling and share-worthy content. The new rt.ly tool will facilitate this approach by helping you spot and keep track of what topics are currently trending, allowing you to tailor highly relevant content for greater impact.

Because Realtime allows you to filter your search for keywords and locations, you can target very specific markets, and the option to specify a social network gives you the edge when it comes to targeting the right platform for your niche.

There is also an option to specify a target domain, giving you the option to research what your competitors are up to within their social spaces. With Social SEO landscapes still relatively undefined this could prove incredibly useful for gauging what other companies in your sector are doing to improve their visibility and social engagement.

The target domain option will also allow you to monitor and measure the success of your own Social SEO campaign. By entering your domain and keywords it is possible to quickly find how many clicks per minute a piece of content, infographic, video or other tailored asset has received.

Finally this new social-search tool has the added benefit of allowing active users to find content that is relevant to their interests, increasing the visibility of your campaign and giving you a better chance of getting those links shared.

As Realtime is still in beta, currently it only lists links that have been shortened with through bt.ly. So, although this platform has significant potential value, only time will tell whether it lives up to this promise. Any company looking to trial the service should stick to shortening all URLs with bit.ly for now to ensure that they appear in the Realtime results.

One promising sign is that the company appear to be taking on board all feedback and are releasing weekly updates. This week has seen a more detailed approach to location searching with the ability to find relevant results at city level. This certainly demonstrates that monitoring shared links is in the forefront of the industry’s mind and this new tool could provide real insight in the future.

It’s early days yet, but by the time the platform is ready to launch Bit.ly may well have proved their worth within the Social Search market.

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